Volume: 4 Issue: 1 (2026) Serial Number: 5

The modal collapse objection holds that a doctrine of divine simplicity, on which the first cause (prauzrok) is identical with its own act, entails that everything the first cause brings about is brought about necessarily, so that no created state of affairs could have failed to obtain. Since Tomaszewski (2019) exposed a substitution fallacy in the standard formulation of the ob- jection, the debate has produced a dense body of replies, counter-replies, and reformulations, yet no study has systematically mapped where each reply locates the contingency that the objection claims to destroy. This article closes that gap. Drawing on a corpus of twenty-two peer-reviewed contributions published between 2019 and 2026, I develop the Contingency Localization Frame- work (CLF), a five-fold typology that classifies every extant response according to the theoretical site at which it houses contingency: the inferential structure of the argument itself, extrinsic effect- side predication, multi-track divine power, intra-divine aspectival differentiation, or a gradated emanational hierarchy. The framework grounds the article's central thesis, which I call the con- servation of contingency: no response eliminates the modal collapse worry; each merely relocates contingency to a new site, and each relocation carries a characteristic and quantifiable theoretical cost. Bibliometric analysis of the corpus shows that 63.6% of contributions defend simplicity while 36.4% press the objection, that extrinsicalist strategies account for 53.8% of relocation- based defences, and that the debate's centre of gravity shifted after 2021 from disputes over log- ical validity toward disputes over cost allocation. The framework is then extended to the emana- tionist metaphysics articulated in Knežević (2024) and analysed by Đukić (2025), which I argue constitutes a fifth, structurally distinct localization strategy with its own liabilities. The conclusion assesses which localizations survive the providential collapse argument of Schmid (2022) and at what price.

Aristotelian-Thomistic arguments for a first cause turn on a distinction between acci- dentally ordered causal series, whose members act in succession, and essentially ordered series, whose members act simultaneously and whose intermediate members exercise causal power only as instruments deriving that power from a prior member. Critics of these arguments have con- centrated on regress termination and on whether persistence needs a sustaining cause; almost nobody has asked what the instrumental structure itself demands of physics. I argue that the standard formulation of the per se argument carries a tacit commitment I call the Derivational Sufficiency Requirement (DSR): that whatever an intermediate cause contributes to its effect is wholly derived from what it receives from the prior member. DSR is trivially satisfied under determinism and non-trivially contested under every indeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics. Working from a corpus of thirty-eight verified sources published between 2019 and 2026, I develop the article's original contribution: the derivational trilemma, according to which a defender of the per se argument must either (i) commit the argument to a deterministic inter- pretation, thereby forfeiting the interpretation-neutrality classical theists typically claim, or (ii) weaken DSR to the derivation of propensity distributions rather than of singular outcomes, or (iii) accept irreducibly underived transitions inside the very structure designed to eliminate brute facts. A survey of eight interpretive families shows the trilemma to be exhaustive over the extant options, with 37.5% falling on the first horn, 25.0% on the second, and 37.5% on the third. I then defend the second horn as the strongest available position and identify a convergence, so far unremarked in either literature, between the propensity-based indeterministic physics of Del Santo and Gisin (2023) and the Thomistic distinction between primary and secondary causation. The convergence has a determinate price: the per se argument, so weakened, delivers a sustainer of powers rather than a determiner of outcomes. The emanational morphology of Knežević (2024a) is examined as a further, structurally distinct way of paying that price.

A red woollen thread tied around the wrist of a newborn, or worked into the swaddling, belt, or headcloth of a woman in the forty days following birth, is among the most widely reported protective devices in the ethnographic record of the Dinaric highlands and the wider Slavic Or- thodox world. It is also absent from the canonical texts of the tradition within whose ritual cal- endar it operates. The postpartum period is the object of a precise ecclesiastical framework — the prayers of the first day, the eighth-day naming, the fortieth-day churching of mother and child — and the red thread appears at no point in that framework, being neither prescribed nor for- bidden. This article treats that absence as its central datum rather than as an incidental gap. Work- ing from the published ethnographic and lived-religion literature on the Western Balkans and the wider Slavic area, and from the comparative literature on amulets, charms, and the materiality of magic, I argue that the standard boundary-object model, which explains an artefact's circulation between communities by its interpretive flexibility, misdescribes what is happening here. The original contribution of the article is the canonical vacancy thesis: the red thread circulates be- tween folk therapeutic practice and ecclesiastical practice not because the two communities read it differently but because one of them has issued no reading at all, and this normative silence is a structural condition rather than an oversight. From the thesis I develop a three-tier typology of ritual objects by institutional status — canonically incorporated, canonically proscribed, canoni- cally vacant — and derive a falsifiable prediction: vacant-tier objects should display higher per- sistence under secularisation and biomedicalisation than objects in either of the other tiers, since their retention incurs no doctrinal cost and their abandonment yields no doctrinal benefit. The article is conceptual and comparative; it advances no claim resting on new fieldwork, and the concluding section specifies the fieldwork that would be needed to test the prediction properly.

European assisted dying statutes diverge sharply on whether an applicant must be ter- minally ill, and the divergence has consequences that the literature has not adequately theorised. Where terminality is required, eligibility turns largely on a medically verifiable predicate about the applicant's condition. Where it is not required, as in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, and as an implication of the German Federal Constitutional Court's 2020 ruling, the whole weight of gatekeeping falls on a predicate that only the applicant can access: unbearable suffering. This article develops the concept of the epistemic gatekeeping load, defined as the share of an eligibility determination that rests on first-personally accessible predicates, and argues that it varies inversely with terminality requirements across the European regimes. From this I derive the article's central thesis, which I call procedural substitution: as the epistemic gatekeeping load rises, legal systems do not and cannot compensate by refining the substantive definition, and instead substitute pro- cedural architecture for substantive review. Mortier v. Belgium is the moment at which the Eu- ropean Court of Human Rights made this substitution explicit at the supervisory level, holding that a permissive regime does not violate Article 2 in substance even for a non-terminal psychi- atric applicant while locating a violation in the independence of the ex post control body and the length of the criminal investigation. Karsai v. Hungary confirms the pattern from the opposite direction through a wide margin of appreciation. The article's normative claim follows: the long- running complaint that “unbearable suffering” is unacceptably vague is misdirected, since the vagueness is not a drafting defect that better definition could cure but a structural entailment of abandoning terminality, and the appropriate locus of reform is therefore the design of review institutions. The analysis is doctrinal and comparative, draws on sixty verified sources, and offers legal analysis rather than legal advice.

The anthropological literature on waiting has developed along two tracks. One treats waiting as an exercise of institutional power, in which the imposition of delay produces subordi- nated subjects; the other treats the waiting room as an atmospheric and spatial condition with its own affective properties. Neither track has examined how waiting rooms stratify internally, nor what difference it makes whether that stratification is visible to those it disadvantages. This article addresses that gap. Drawing on the published ethnographic and health-services literature, it pro- poses a distinction among three regimes of temporal stratification, differentiated by where the conversion of social advantage into temporal priority occurs relative to the sight-lines of those waiting: sequestered conversion, in which advantage is exercised outside the room; codified con- version, in which it is exercised inside the room under published criteria; and exposed conversion, in which it is exercised inside the room through unpublished, particularistic means. The article's original contribution is the claim that public healthcare waiting rooms in Southeast Europe are characterised by exposed conversion, and that this produces a distinctive attentional posture I term surveillant waiting: attention directed laterally at co-waiters and at the staff-door threshold rather than forward at one's own turn, because the operative uncertainty concerns not when one will be seen but who will be seen first and on what basis. The consequence for the article's second key term is that embodied patience in such settings is better understood as vigilance held in a still body than as resignation or discipline. Three falsifiable predictions follow, of which the sharpest is that reducing waiting duration should not reduce dissatisfaction under exposed conversion, whereas rendering the conversion either invisible or codified should. The study is conceptual and comparative and rests on no new fieldwork; the conclusion specifies the observational design that would test the predictions.

The article offers a systematic reconstruction and contemporary re-evaluation of Boethius's solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge in Book V of the Consolation of Philosophy. The central research question is whether the Boethian doctrine of eternity — defined as interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio, the whole, simultaneous and perfect possession of unending life — still constitutes a defensible response to the dilemma of divine omniscience and human freedom, given the objections raised against it in the analytic philosophy of religion between 2019 and 2025. The research applies a hermeneutic-analytical methodology that combines close textual analysis of Consolatio V.1–V.6 with rational reconstruction of its argumentative structure and a comparative-systematic mapping of that structure onto the contemporary debate. The analysis yields three principal results. First, Boethius's solution is shown to be a unified three-component strategy, integrating an epistemic principle (the modes- of-cognition thesis), a metaphysical doctrine (atemporal eternity), and a modal distinction (simple versus conditional necessity), such that no component functions successfully in isolation. Second, the article develops its original contribution, the praesential-dependence reading, according to which the tota simul doctrine operates as a metaphysical vehicle for an implicit dependence response: divine vision is explanatorily posterior to the free act it apprehends, which anticipates the contemporary dependence solutions of Wasserman, Law, Cyr, and Fischer. Third, it is argued that the most influential recent objections — Hasker's presentist critique and Cyr's superfluity objection — target the metaphysical component while leaving the praesential-dependence core intact. The conclusion is that Boethius's fifth-century solution remains a live option in the twenty- first-century debate precisely when it is read as a structurally unified dependence response rather than as a bare appeal to timelessness.